by Jeff Long
It was an eighty-nine-cent Bosch pear, the type Annie used to love. He imagined the blade of his Swiss Army knife cutting neat sections. He would eat it at their cache at the base of El Cap. He would have it in slices, resting on his back. That kept him in motion, casting himself at this thing that did not need him.
For the moment, he could pretend to be a pilgrim lost in a dark wood at the foot of the mountain, though the woods were not so much dark as the walls above were so bright. And climbers never called El Cap a mountain.
The forest thickened. It had been a drought summer. The leaves were dry as old newspaper. Twigs scratched against his pack. Acorn shells lay scattered, emptied far ahead of winter by hungry animals. Deprived of rain, the dusty rhododendrons looked unwashed. The locals were all quoting the Farmers’ Almanac to each other, predicting an early winter and tons of snow.
Not much more now, a few hundred yards at most. There is a way to rest while walking that he’d learned by watching porters in Nepal. With each step, you trade the whole weight of your burden from one leg to the other…then lock and pause…then step again. Done right, a person can go all day with it.
He stopped abruptly, on instinct.
The water rocked on his back like ten tiny seas. One foot forward, the other knee locked, he stood in place. Something had changed. But what?
He waited with his head and body pitched against the pack weight. He let his senses roam. The forest had quit moving. There was no scurry of squirrels. The jays had fallen silent. The air was still.
Whatever the animals had sensed, he was sensing it last. It made him feel dull and vulnerable. A moment before, he’d been synched into the forest’s flow. Now, suddenly, he was alone. And yet not alone.
It might be a predator. There were bears, though the decades of tourism had turned them into garbage mutts. Or a coyote gone rabid. Or a mountain lion. During his long absence from the States, they’d migrated throughout the Sierras. Joggers and mountain bikers were getting dragged down on the outskirts of L.A.
Something was watching him.
He waited patiently. Not a motion broke the jungly screen. No birds sailed through the trees. Hugh turned heavily, and there was nothing downslope either.
With a glance up at El Cap, he decided it was all inside his head. He had doubts about the climb, and so now his doubts were prowling the forest.
He shrugged the pack higher and continued on. The little seas sloshed by his ears. Sweat hit the rocks in polka dots. The pear.
The air took on a smell. It reminded him of a hunter’s camp. But this was Yosemite, and there were no hunters.
A kill, he guessed. That would explain the stillness and this scent of fresh meat. One animal had taken another.
He reached the edge of a small clearing. A woman was in there. The red bark glistened. It didn’t register at first. He almost went around.
She was taking a nap, obviously. This was her privacy. But with a second glance, a guilty one, a widower’s glance, he realized this was the crux of the forest’s sudden hush.
She rested on her back on a flat talus slab, face up to the wall of golden light. He took it in. Small breasts. A jut of pelvis. Brown hair braided with beads the color of a rainbow. Her chin was tucked just slightly.
For a moment, his mind refused the awful truth. She was at such peace, one hand over her heart, the other dangling from the stone as if she were drifting on a boat in a stream. She had searched out this perfect view. She had laid herself down in a stone trough that cradled her skull and shoulders and womanly hips.
He took a step higher, and of course this was no cradling trough. The slab was flat. The underside of her lay crushed against the stone.
Hugh flinched once, but did not back away. The lizard king had caught her, that starving, patient thing. People talked about Mother Nature. Mother, hell. One false move and you ended up in its belly like this.
He held back, piecing together the details. A seat harness girdled her thighs and waist. She was a climber, not a suicide or a murder victim. He knew roughly when she’d fallen and from where. Just a half hour ago, before setting off from the road, he had seen her and her two partners working it out twenty-five hundred vertical feet off the deck, closing in on the summit. Until now, he’d had no idea one might be a woman.
He set his feet and tipped back his pack to get a proper look. The vast, radiant panels of El Cap gleamed through the darkening trees. It took a minute for his eyes to adjust to the immense scale and orient himself to the cracks and shadows. A dark hole on the wall was his landmark. If there were any survivors, they would be cowering in there. If not, the rest of them were probably lying close by in the forest.
He lowered his eyes to the woman. She had crashed within the last few minutes. The first flies had yet to arrive.
He must have been within a hundred feet when she landed. How could he not have heard such an earth-shattering thing? There should have been the sounds of tree limbs snapping and a body—a life—exploding. Where was the thunder of her collision? Where was the howl?
And still Hugh remained on the outskirts. He did not have to be part of this thing. Many people would have bolted from the scene, some to run for help, others to be shed of the horror. Even among climbers, with their vaunted brotherhood of the rope, some would have fled, some would have reached for their cameras, and some would have just made a wide detour and continued with business.
The smell was mounting. Blood and shit.
His horror aside, the crash would steal hours from his day, right when he had his own climb to tend. He had no obligation to her, no duty as a witness. She was a stranger to him. And though he had traveled among Bedouins who lived their lives like books already written, Hugh did not traffic in predestination. He did not believe he was meant to be here to help her to the other side.
But her quietness pulled at him. And—again—he had that sensation of being watched.
He resigned himself. “Ah, Glass, you’re in it now,” he said, and ponderously backed against a boulder to ease off his pack. Released from his cargo, he had an odd moment of separation. The death chained down his mood, even as his body felt buoyant and thankful for the release.
He approached her warily. She frightened him. From this side, she seemed too perfect. Where was the ruin? Her lips were parted. She had white teeth, and five small earrings like silver fringe along one lobe. Her beads were real minerals, not plastic.
As a geologist, Hugh could pick out the turquoise, agate, jade, and ruby, and even their likely value and source. She wore no rings or bracelets, of course, not on a climb. But it was easy to imagine her adorned for the street, like some barbarian loose among the lowlanders.
A few colorful slings and a gear rack crossed her chest like bandoliers. Hugh eyed the equipment, reading in it her last minutes on the wall. The rack held little gear. She’d either exhausted her protection just prior to the fall, or had deliberately gone up with next to nothing. The latter, he decided. The few pieces of “pro” had small heads on thin wire, the sort that favor very delicate placements. That told him much. She’d been deep in Indian country up there, and had selected for a deft, light strike, for ballet, not biceps.
He touched her shoulder. It was basic and necessary. He had to make contact, and introduce himself, and get steady. This was real.
She was still warm. Before his eyes, even as he touched her, she lost her color. The rosy cheeks went gray. Her lips bleached to wax. He drew his hand away.
He circled the slab, and it was like going to the dark side of the moon. The real destruction crouched back here. Her envelope of skin had ruptured up and down her side. With all the blood, it was hard to tell the rope from the entrails. Her snapped ribs showed like something in a butcher shop. Her face—so pretty from the other side—sagged in buckled folds.
“Why you?” he whispered, partly to her, but mostly to himself. He regretted finding her. He regretted her death. Most of all, he regretted the waste.
She w
as young, maybe twenty, but that was not the real pity of it. Climbers are realists. Risk confers both gain and loss, and youth had nothing to do with it. Living in other lands, seeing the ravages of famine and disease, Hugh had come to view this kind of risk as an extravagance, a kind of personal theater. For him, the tragedy was that he would forever remember this young woman, who had sewn precious stones into her hair and silver into her earlobes, as nothing more than a carcass.
He’d seen worse. Ride the mountains long enough and you were bound to meet the dead. He’d found avalanche victims squeezed into packages no bigger than a TV set, their faces looking up from under his boots and crampons. He’d watched climbers take videos of quick-frozen limbs and torsos scattered on the glaciers beneath Everest. He’d helped retrieve a climber from the base of the Diamond on Longs Peak, just rags and sticks.
He went to his pack, glad to turn away from the stench and ugliness, and found an old green tarp. He snapped it open and covered what he could of her, head first. Only now did he notice one foot turned upside down. Her bones would be jelly.
He began pinning the tarp in place with chunks of granite. For the time being, there was no wind to disturb it, and a few rocks weren’t going to deter animals from rooting underneath while he went to report her. But his handiwork gave shape to the mess. It closed off the bedlam in his mind. When the rangers arrived, they would find her neatly tucked atop the slab. The stones and tarp made final his part of her burial. It signed him out of the terrible event. They could have his tarp.
As if approving, the forest rustled.
Hugh glanced around. The trees gently creaked and dry leaves rattled like coins. A primal thought sprang up: Her spirit’s still lingering.
He didn’t dismiss the possibility. People assumed geologists were earthbound and geocentric, but even the ones who were carried lucky coins or a rabbit’s foot. Searching for oil and gas involved the hard data of shot graphs and core samples, but also a good bit of the witching rod and a vigilance for secrets layered deep underfoot.
In the Arab countries, and Nigeria, and Louisiana, he’d shared field camps with experts trained to decipher the stratigraphy of hundreds of millions of years, who nonetheless spoke of biblical creation as a fact. Upon discovering Hugh was a mountaineer, one geologist had begged him to help explore Mount Ararat in Turkey, convinced the ark was frozen into its summit snow. Some oilmen lived like desert ascetics in four-wheel drive, in constant motion through faraway sands, chewing khat, smoking hash, taking peyote, having visions. These were the soothsayers who provided Tony the Tiger with his oil.
Hugh knew the species. He knew himself. Superstition came with the territory.
His progression to geology—from a rock hound in second grade, cracking open egg-shaped geodes, to a master of science with a license to roam the ends of the earth—had left him more pagan than American. Climbing in the Himalayas, he’d passed among villagers who believed in monsters and goddesses perched on the summits, and the river of consciousness.
He never talked about such things. But he saw life forces dodging everywhere, in everything from man to lizards and bugs, but also in trees and rocks and crystals of salt and ice. At the same time, he believed to his core that none of it mattered at the human level. It just was.
“Go on now,” he murmured to her spirit. “We’ll take care of this.” This. The wreckage.
The trees settled.
Done. He finished with the tarp and stood back to memorize the exact location. He would go down and make his report to the rangers. He wanted rest and a hot shower. And distance. He needed a few hours away from El Cap and its consequences. Because, this aside, first thing in the morning he and Lewis were heading up.
But the more he tried to settle on a landmark, the more the forest seemed overrun with the trees and thatches of manzanita and rhododendron. It was not like him to be so illiterate with the land. Even deep in the Rub’, Saudi Arabia’s Rub’ al-Khali, or Empty Quarter, there was always some way to pinpoint your position. He felt lost suddenly.
The death, the brutality of her collision, had him more unsettled than he thought. That was not good on the eve of his launch. Bear down, Glass. Walk on.
High on the towering wall, the sun line was draining higher. The earth was moving. He faced downhill, and there was not a trace of his way. He glanced at his watch, as if by knowing the time he could extract a longitude at least, anything to fix this rootless, spinning site in place.
The breeze stirred again. The shoulders and back of his shirt were soaked. The chill leaped on him like an animal. While he was getting his sweater from the pack, he had an idea. A sentiment.
That high on the wall, after so many days in the sun, she would have been thirsty. He left a Clorox jug of water near the head of the slab, an offering. Let the rangers think what they wanted.
THREE
Going down, he had to fight to not race. There was no urgency. She was dead. He would only trash his knees by rushing. And yet he wanted to get away. No desperation, mind you. Just a natural desire to leave the death far behind. It was not the first time. The desert surfaced in his mind, the red, alien desert, the dunes at sunset. Annie. Thy will be done.
He had brought two collapsible ski poles for the descent. Long ago he would have gone loping down the talus, agile as a goat. Now the poles clicked on rocks and snagged on branches.
Without the pack bearing down on him, the forest was a different place, a taller place. Instead of staring at roots and rocks, he could look up and around. The redwoods soared like cathedral spires. The sky was blue. A glorious day.
He eased himself down a clutter of stones. No snakes to worry about at this time of year, only the venomous oak and ivy. And his left ACL, and that tickle of torn meniscus in his right knee, and the bum ankle, and his hips. Save it for the Captain. The climb was when the sum of him could be greater than his failing parts.
The undergrowth thinned. He saw a figure coming through the trees. “Ha-low,” he called. “Here. Up here.”
He slowed. He was back among the living. The presence at his back slid away, that sense of stilled waiting.
What emerged from the trees was a strange brew of leather, rags, and a parka bandaged with Xs of duct tape. He looked like a time traveler, wearing a John Muir–style slouch hat with an eagle feather in the band, and blackened buckskin pants that had shrunk to midshin. He wore Air Nikes and carried a hiking stick with animal heads whittled along the shaft.
The man limped closer, winded from his slog. He was skinny, with a junk-food paunch. At first Hugh was so glad to have someone to share his news with that he ignored the peculiarities.
“There’s been an accident,” Hugh said.
“Do you think I’m blind?” The man glared at him, and coughed. “What have you done?”
Now Hugh saw the palsy laming the man’s entire left side. “I covered her.”
“Well, you shouldn’t have come. Everything was fine. She wouldn’t have come off. The rope wouldn’t have broke. They were almost to the top. Then you show up.”
Hugh looked closer, startled by the hostility, trying to rationalize it. Shock, he thought. “You saw her fall?” he asked.
“Right from where she went, the whole damn way, all of it.” The man leaned on his stick and coughed again.
“How did it happen?” Knowing wouldn’t change a thing. She was dead. But Hugh was curious. Here was an eyewitness.
“You tell me, mister.” Tree sap had glued goose down and needles to his beard. He’d bent too close to a campfire and frizzled a patch to the jawline.
“I don’t know,” said Hugh. “It was over by the time I found her.”
“You call that an accident? You find her in the middle of nowhere? You? By accident?”
“I was talking about the fall.”
“Because there’s no such thing as accidents. I’m here. You’re here. She was up there. Now she’s down here. Get it? You see the gist of it, all coming together? You?”
/> “Not really,” said Hugh. Driftwood, he thought. You saw his type curled on grates in the cities and climbing out of Dumpsters. This was simply Yosemite’s version. They came up from the cities and towns, stealing into the Valley, full of demons. Some were war vets with nightmares, or drug addicts, or college runaways full of Black Elk Speaks. Hugh saw the necklace inside his parka now, little animal bones and fetishes strung together. This was no college kid, though.
“You don’t believe me. It’s starting to happen now, just like I dreamed it.”
“We need to tell the rangers,” Hugh said. “Do you have a car? My friend dropped me off. I was going to thumb back.”
The man went on raving. “You think I don’t know about you? You and your buddy stashing gear and food at the base. I know you’re going up.”
Great, thought Hugh. Mr. Muir had been following them. There was no sense in asking if he’d stolen anything, he’d only lie. Now they’d have to waste time going through the haul bags to see what might be missing.
“Big men. Big walls,” the man said. “Big mistake.”
He was getting more aggressive. Hugh sized him up. He might have a limp, but he was bigger than Hugh, and that hiking stick was thick enough to break bones. But if it came to a footrace, Hugh figured he was quicker, even with his hobbling and ski poles. And suddenly he didn’t like the idea of this man going up to the body.
“Come with me,” he said. “We’ll do this together.”
“Do what?”
“The rangers need to know.”
“Give her away to them? You?” The slouch hat filled with shadows. “She don’t belong to you.”
Not good, thought Hugh. But what could he do, drag the man down to the road? Tie him to a tree? With what? Their rope was up at the base. And it was their climbing rope. “She can’t stay here,” Hugh said. “The animals will be coming. We need to get her in before night.”
“Just because you go up on the walls, you don’t own the place.”
“None of us do. Not me, or you.” Hugh gestured up at El Cap where the other climbers were, or had been. “Nor them.”
